「これが、モノを殺すと言うことだ…！」

After an entire year of downsides, like being blatantly cheated on and taken advantage of, having my car involved in traffic accidents five or six times, getting a crappy job, and having my laptop blow up (among a number of other things), I have finally started getting my goddamn life back on track. I sent my car in for repairs today, I started a course on udemy about mobile app building with Xamarin Forms, and been dropping my CV everywhere applying for better job options.

I’ve seen a bunch of compilations like these on various places in the web, but I’m listing these from personal experience. In no particular order:

Getting asked by everyone and their bloody mother to fix their computers. This is by far, I think, the absolute worst of them all. Just the mere fact that I have a degree in ANYTHING related to computers doesn’t make me the family technician, assholes. Even more so considering that my degree is in SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (aka knowing how to program efficiently and effectively), not computer repair. (This is, more often than not, not just limited to hardware, but also virus-cleaning, installing updates, and ridding the computer of all the fucking porn you unwittingly stuck in the system because you didn’t heed our fucking warning NOT to use Internet Explorer.) To add insult to injury, it usually has to be done for free, quickly, efficiently and with extremely detailed explanations, because if there’s one thing these pricks do well, it’s being fussy and overly demanding.

Incomplete error reports. For fucking Zeus’s sake, telling me that you found an error and telling me nothing is the exact same bleeding thing at all if you don’t tell me WHAT THE ERROR MESSAGE WAS. Apparently, the fact that I know how to program also makes me somehow capable of divining absolutely any and all errors, the exact cause, the circumstances of when it was triggered, and everything related to it just by you telling me that you got an error. Never fucking mind that a single software can crash in a myriad of ways with sometimes TENS OF THOUSANDS of error messages, or that due to hardware/software configuration it might be an error that only happens to you, or any of that shit. “I got an error, you have to solve it!” “But what kind of error did you get?” “I don’t know, I just know I got an error!” is way too common a conversation for my personal tastes.

Users ignoring app documentation. Apparently, for the users, the Instruction Manual and Help documents are just there to occupy space and look pretty. And hence, the gods saw fit to grant unto us developers and unto sysadmins as well one of the most useful acronyms for when a (l)user asks a stupid question that’s already answered clearly in the documentation: RTFM. (Which translates to Read The FUCKING Manual — and yes, that fucking goes to YOU as well.)

Deadlines (especially ones NOT set by us). Once I’ve agreed to develop an application or any other piece of software for you, it’s understandable that you may want to know when you can get your finished product. But when you hire me to develop something for you which YOU will be delivering to a third party, setting deadlines arbitrarily without consulting ME is a surefire way to get me pissed and look for ANY way to use the legal system against you so I can fuck you sideways with your project and GTFO. In case you didn’t notice, I don’t fucking give a flying rat’s ass about who you or the actual clients are, or what your relationship is with them, or anything of the sort. I want to do my fucking job, get paid, and go home. But when you start telling the client that the product will be ready by a given date where I am 100% sure that it will NOT be, that’s when I start actually getting morose and actively attempt to make YOU look bad in front of your client. Preferably, in ideal cases, also having side conversations with said client explaining the ACTUAL situation and circumstances of the product.

Unexpected bugs and errors after code freeze and when porting code to production. This one pisses me off to no end. You make sure your code is as clean as you can, you make an actual inhuman effort to make sure everything is working, you document all possible exceptions and error situations, and write code to make sure your software fails gracefully if an error comes up; you build your error library with error codes, descriptive messages, and make absolutely freaking 100% SURE everything works… And the moment you move your stuff to the production environment, EVERYTHING starts to blow up here or there. Cue an insatiable, irresistible desire to rip your hair out of your scalp with your bare hands.

I was going to make a post about how I’m looking for people to play Resident Evil 5 on Steam with, but now I don’t even want that.

I’m majorly pissed and frustrated at a job in which the three devs (me and two others) are doing 90% of the work and getting only 10% of the gratification, in which 90% of the bullshit going on isn’t even related to the three of us working on it and we’re getting only 10% of the reassurance that what we’re doing is actually worthwhile, and in which we are yet the ones getting 90% of the shit and only 10% of the remuneration (both in morale and currency), because the four assholes that came before us literally got by pretty much unscathed, as long as we’re concerned.

This is the first fucking time in my entire life I’ve ever felt this frustrated at anything or anyone. Right now, I’m actually regretting I took this project on. I’ve dealt with pressure before. I’ve dealt with INTER-MOTHERFUCKING-NATIONAL pressure before. But this is a level of pressure that I don’t think anyone should be forced to deal with, and much less from an unapologetic manager who has SHIT idea of what’s being done and how much effort it’s taking to do it, and who fails to cooperate when we pitch ideas that might somehow make our workload more manageable. I don’t fucking care if the project is one fucking year behind. That’s YOUR fucking problem for hiring a bunch of inept code monkeys and not taking care to figure out the proper development cycle of an application like this. Not mine.

Note to self: Don’t take on any more projects you don’t know shit about from now on. Stick to what you can do, you fucking imbecile. Stop looking at the money and look at yourself, you blithering moron.

And stop fighting the people that have even the merest shade of appreciation for you. Keep doing that shit and it’ll drive you to suicide. You know that because you’ve seen it happen. You don’t want to end up with a shotgun round through your brains like your friend did.

Suddenly, that gun in the old man’s closet’s starting to look real friendly. Then again, I’m a shit-ass coward, so I don’t think I’ll be doing that either.

I managed to score a small contract to finish a software for the government that had already been started and I’ve been losing sleep over working on this thing. It’s good experience, it’s amazing portfolio material for my CV, and the place where I’m deployed has a nice work environment — but the sort of piece of shit code I’m working on makes me want to pull out the already very few hairs left in my scalp.

At the very least, I’m thankful that the other two developers working on this project with me are way beyond my skill level (due to more years of actual, commercial work experience compared to my theoretical experience), good sports, and always willing to give me a hand.

MOST RETARDED THING THE UNITED STATES HAS COME UP WITH IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

Giving so-called “copyright holders” basically the legal and constitutional ability to essentially fucking CENSOR THE MOTHERFUCKING INTERNET at their whim and leisure?

No thanks, I’m not as much of an idiot as Hollywood’s money would have the US congress believe.

And yes, I used lowercase for the word congress. Their current stupidity/abuse of power/profiteering doesn’t merit my using a capital initial to refer to them.

Thus, my website header is now censored and will remain so until a decision about SOPA is reached. The hearing will reconvene next Wednesday and NOT in 2012 as their dirty tactics would have had us believe initially. So those of you who live in the US, find the phone number of your representative’s office and KEEP CALLING THEM.